PhD 2 Farm-to-farmer, farm-to-air transfer of antimicrobial resistance during farming practices.    

This project aims to investigate the transfer of the resistome from farm-to-farmer, focusing on aerosols generated during farming practices, such as slurry mixing and spreading, animal feeding practice and barn as potential transmission mechanisms. Utilize state-of-the-art techniques like metagenomic sequencing, advanced computation, and statistics to profile the farm resistome, identify predator species, assess the persistence of AMR genes in the environment, and analyze the potential risk of their transfer to humans. Employ various methods, including aerosol and fecal sampling, resistance testing, metagenomic and bioinformatics, to comprehensively study the transmission pathways of the farm resistome to farmers during routine activities.

Objectives

Transfer of the resistome from farm-to-farmer through aerosol represents a large gap in our current knowledge. In particular, there is little knowledge of how aerosols generated during farming practices could be a mechanism of resistome transmission. So this PhD project aims to detect the general airborne resistome and furtherly to assess the correlation betweeen the environment and the farm transmission.